"One may smile, and smile, and be a villain." I'll count my gender equality chickens when I see them hatching.

I don't like to nitpick on linguistic correctness, but I fear the ungrammatical "Conversations on Women Development", which also skilfully avoids any nomenclature pertaining to decades of the global women's movement, is a harbinger of things to come.

Some items we'd see if this isn't grrl power lipstick on same old pig:

- End family structure as condition for public housing
- End discriminatory criteria for family migration
- Strong labour rights for all including domestic workers
- Welfare benefits support unpaid work

- Enforceable anti-discrimination duties
- Comprehensive sex education based on respecting individual autonomy
- Rights-based, not law-and-order, approach to sex workers
- LGBT rights

The list goes on.

A few more women on corporate boards, a little more flexi-work & noisy saber-rattling at most obviously egregious cases of sexual violence--

--isn't equivalent to embedding equal rights, regardless of gender, in society.

I'm not very optimistic.

But I would love to be wrong, PAP government. Prove me wrong.

I'm trying not to go on & on & on about this (some of you may recall it was once my job to do just that)

But it's also quite irritating that Shanmugam's two e.g.s of discrimination are scenes in Yes Minister, Asterisk & Obelisk.

Fiction.

Like no real example is worth citing.